'Designer impostor' products are funny things. On one hand, they're rather mawkish and genuinely looked down upon because, as the term implies, they're bargain-basement replicas of established and lauded matter. Sometimes they don't even bear a slight resemblance to the product they're knocking off – but that's the true lottery gamble of them; sometimes what you get is more palatable and easier to respect because of it. Sometimes it's god awful and the patron knows he's been taken for a ride, but sometimes what you get is as good as the name brand – even if it's for different reasons.
Take Parachute for example. Sporting a derivative name and 'down home' aesthetic, it would be easy to assume that the quintet might sound like a younger version of Coldplay but, given that there's already a 'Coldplay' on the market, it stands to reason that if they were even vaguely similar, such comparisons would become instantly abhorrent.
Happily, the similarities are only skin deep.
Skin deep or not, it'll still throw listeners for a loop for the first five seconds at the beginning of “All That I Am.” After that introductory moment, Parachute leaves no question that listeners expecting to hear “Coldplay-light-and-youthful” will not get what they paid for; they're not exactly your average rock, pop or emo band, but the quintet has enough of the earmarks of each genre to be palatable to a college audience and will really hook a young one.
Combining staple elements and conventions currently being employed by everyone from the Jonas Brothers to Fall Out Boy (tight, pitch-perfect melodies performed by a confident singer that knows how to work a mic, sharp guitars and arrangements that will appeal to a Top 40 radio audience), Losing Sleep offers an emotionally articulate response to the boys-agonizing-over-girls (or “you're the voice inside my head, the reason why I'm singing” if you like) plaint that has overtaken pop again in that, while the sentiments are coming from the same base, they're not delivered in the same formulaic sibilance that's currently being overused. The more dense instrumental arrangements of songs like “She (For Liz),” “The Mess I Made” and “Under Control” imply a more accomplished songwriting ability closer to the vein of Rufus Wainwright or Ben Folds. For those that are long-since familiar with that design, Parachute offers a unique quandary in that the cynical will wonder where the band came from with this level of quality already in place while the less worldly in the audience will simply be content to sing along, smiling; the band's hybrid combination of Jonas Brothers-esque melody and longing crossed with Fall Out Boy's use of the Eighties pop pantheon as a snide hook will be its own reward for them.
With that said, it stands to reason that Parachute represent a here-to-fore untapped niche in the music marketplace: as those young people that were fans of the Jonas Brothers get older, they'll outgrow Disney but may not yet be ready for emo. With music like that on Losing Sleep, Parachute will be able to cover that half-step in between like a sort of twee-mo; catering to that complicated middle ground that is 'too big' for one, but not enough for the other. It's a transient niche that fans will pass through quickly, but it is definitely a demographic large enough to register a couple of gold records for the band.
Band:
www.parachutemusic.com/
www.myspace.com/parachuteband
Album:
Losing Sleep is out now. Buy it here on Amazon.
